Said and Orientalism

Said and orientalism

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(Copyright Jan. 19, 2007 by The Chronicle of Higher Education)

In the nearly 30 years since Edward Said published the hugely influential Orientalism, his indictment of racism and imperialism in Western scholarship on the Orient has had its share of plaudits and condemnations. Now Robert Irwin, the Middle East editor of The Times Literary Supplement, has reignited the controversy with his broadside against the late Columbia University professor. In Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (published in Britain as For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies), Irwin defends the work of 18th- and 19th-century European scholars who wrote about the East and denounces Orientalism as "a work of malignant charlatanry in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from wilful misrepresentations." It is no surprise that this sort of vitriolic prose has sparked a debate among Said's longstanding critics and staunch defenders.

THE CRITIQUE:

Robert Irwin: Said's presentation of the history of Orientalism as a canon of great but wicked books, almost all by dead white males, was that of a literary critic who wildly overvalued the importance of high literature in intellectual history. ... Said, who also overvalued the contestatory role of the intellectual, seems to have held the view that the political problems of the Middle East were ultimately textual ones that could be solved by critical- reading skills. As he saw it, it was discourse and textual strategies that drove the imperial project and set up the rubber plantations, dug out the Suez Canal, and established garrisons of legionnaires. Since Orientalism is by its nature a Western sickness, the same must be true of imperialism. The Persians, who under Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes built up a mighty empire and sought to add Greece to that empire, were not denounced by Said for imperialism. On the contrary, they were presented as the tragic and innocent victims of misrepresentation by Greek playwrights. (Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents)

RESPONSES:

Terry Eagleton, University of Manchester: There is no doubt that Irwin pinpoints a good deal of slipshod scholarship and factual error in Said's revered text. It is also true that this would come rather more convincingly from someone who could produce an accurate factual account of Gramsci and post-structuralism, rather than the grotesque travesty of them to be found here. But there is a sense in which it does not matter all that much, since Irwin and Said are for the most part simply talking past each other.

For Said, orientalism signifies a whole cultural discourse, one that habitually represents the east as indolent, treacherous, passive, inscrutable, devious, feminized, and inferior. He is speaking of an ideological formation pervasive throughout Western history. Irwin, by contrast, believes in his gentle, ivory-tower way that orientalism "is mostly a story of individual scholars." He gives the impression that he could recognize an ideological formation about as readily as he could identify Green Day's greatest hits. He thus dooms his study to partial irrelevance from the outset. It is like trying to refute the charge that Christianity has been a hugely destructive force for social evil by producing an admiring study of St. Thomas Aquinas. (New Statesman)

Michael Dirda, critic: Is Irwin right about Said? He certainly makes a cogent case. And yet. Said too was admired, even revered, by many good and honorable men and women, many of them first-rate thinkers and theorists. Haven't we, after all, persistently tended to view the Middle East through prejudices and distorting lenses of one sort or another? There's no doubt, then, that Dangerous Knowledge will be hotly argued about in departments of literature and Middle Eastern studies for some time to come. Still, like Irwin, I strongly believe that most scholars work hard to discover and tell us the truth. Dangerous Knowledge is a paean to that noble purpose. (The Washington Post)

Maya Jasanoff, University of Virginia: Surely Said's most enduring legacy has been to embed in a rising generation of Western scholars, many of whom are now contemporaries of Orientalism itself, the awareness that their work has political substance and ramifications, whether or not it might appear to be political a priori. Said wanted to break down what he saw as a false "distinction between pure and political knowledge." Does that mean facts do not exist, or that evidence does not matter? Certainly not. But it does mean that scholars ought to be aware of the circumstances governing the kind of knowledge they produce and circulate. An American tourist of average means can visit the library of Tamegroute, scrutinize the manuscripts, and come home with stories and snapshots, while the custodians of such repositories can almost certainly not afford trips abroad, are even less likely to be able to obtain Western visas, and could not under any plausible circumstances participate in Western scholarly discourse. So thank goodness for Orientalists like those profiled by Irwin, who have sought to reach across cultural divides and understand languages, histories, and faiths other than their own. But thank goodness too for Orientalism, which has helped make scholars more conscious of the sources of their own perspectives and privileges in the first place. (London Review of Books)

Gary Kamiya, writer at large: The larger question raised by the success of Orientalism is the venerable one of ends and means. Its defenders say that the West really does have much to feel guilty about, and they argue that Said's book, though flawed, is praiseworthy because it has forced the West to be more self- critical.

But this position is a slippery slope, only a step removed from defending Stalinist realism and other "dialectically justified" hack work. An unflinching look at America's imperialist past -- and the crude stereotypes about the Middle East, ignorant hostility, and out- and-out racism that underlie much of our current foreign policy and helped pave the way for the Iraq war -- is indeed necessary. But Said's everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach is counterproductive. It may have swelled the ranks of subaltern- studies programs and provided grist for numerous postcolonial- studies Ph.D. theses, but that doesn't make his argument correct. In the end, bad books are just bad books, and when they are canonized for instrumental reasons, the result is a coarsening of thought and an ever-widening and unhealthy divide between the academy and mainstream culture. Indeed, there is reason to believe that such sweeping indictments produce a public backlash and result in more bigotry, not less. Demands that villains du jour -- whether males, white people, the West, heterosexuals, or thin people -- reflect on their guilt do not seem to lead to greater enlightenment. (Salon)

SOURCES CITED IN THIS COLUMN

Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (The Overlook Press)

London Review of Books

New Statesman

Salon

The Washington Post

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